[Infrastructure] GitHub Branch Cleanup

[Ryan Sleevi]

More concretely, as an example:

Here's a patch from over 2 years ago I sent to a repository:
https://github.com/chromium/web-page-replay/pull/91

It's from a branch I deleted, from a repository I deleted.

Yet, because I opened a pull request, you can still download
https://patch-diff.githubusercontent.com/raw/chromium/web-page-replay/pull/91.patch
and
see exactly what commits I made, against what version of the 'upstream'
repository, and reproduce them exactly to get the same diff.

This is why I keep asking folks to create Pull Requests for proposed
Ballots. It's the Pull Request that gives us immutability.

On Mon, Feb 3, 2020 at 12:16 PM Ryan Sleevi <sleevi at google.com> wrote:

> Let's first talk about your goals, before we settle on implementation.
>
> What's your particular goal? The whole reason we switched to Git was to
> have an unambiguous history. That history is preserved through Git itself,
> so in the stable case - e.g. a ballot is accepted - the thing we want to
> preserve is the change itself, and that can still be and is preserved.
>
> If the goal is something different, we should nail down what that is. For
> example, we've already touched on how to unambiguously ensure there are no
> modifications during or following the voting, which is the previous concern
> that had been articulated. We haven't guaranteed that Forum infrastructure
> items are preserved (for example, the loss of our Wiki editing history
> during the system migration in 2017), nor have we preserved all the
> attachments that used to be distributed through the Wiki itself, so I can't
> imagine it's just to preserve the links.
>
> If you can articulate the scenario you want to preserve, and the set of
> concerns, then that will help us figure out how best to accommodate that.
>
> For example, the nice thing about the GitHub approach is that you can
> reliably verify the pull request is what was actually integrated and
> committed.
>
> On Mon, Feb 3, 2020 at 12:00 PM Dimitris Zacharopoulos (HARICA) <
> dzacharo at harica.gr> wrote:
>
>> I have some general concerns about loosing the "immutable" redline
>> version that we vote on. If someone deletes a branch (private fork or in
>> the cabforum), the immutable link to the redline that was voted on will be
>> broken.
>>
>> If this is true, then I think we need to have an improved process where a
>> private fork is "copied" back to the cabforum/documents repo, and made
>> read-only or something. Of course I am not a git expert so I'm asking here
>> to get some reassurances that deleting branches will not create
>> unintentional gaps.
>>
>
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